Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry

by Michael Leong

Why have so many contemporary poets turned to source material, from newspapers to governmental records, as inspiration for their poetry? How can citational poems offer a means of social engagement? Contested Records analyzes how some of the most well-known twenty-first century North American poets work with fraught documents. Whether it’s the legal paperwork detailing the murder of 132 African captives, state transcriptions of the last words of death row inmates, or testimony from miners and rescue workers about a fatal mine disaster, author Michael Leong reveals that much of the power of contemporary poetry rests in its potential to select, adapt, evaluate, and extend public documentation. Examining the use of documents in the works of Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Amiri Baraka, Claudia Rankine, M. NourbeSe Philip, and others, Leong reveals how official records can evoke a wide range of emotions—from hatred to veneration, from indifference to empathy, from desire to disgust. He looks at techniques such as collage, plagiarism, re-reporting, and textual outsourcing, and evaluates some of the most loved—and reviled—contemporary North American poems. Ultimately, Leong finds that if bureaucracy and documentation have the power to police and traumatize through the exercise of state power, then so, too, can document-based poetry function as an unofficial, counterhegemonic, and popular practice that authenticates marginalized experiences at the fringes of our cultural memory.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction

308 pages, Paperback

Published May 13, 2020

Reviews

[Geoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's always fun to read an academic tract in another field that I have no experience and history in, both to see how that field structures their arguments but also to see the tiny differences in method or interpretation that spark decades-long feuds and dominate the published literature.

This book is an examination of the rise, over the past few decades, of the use of documents, citations, data, and other archival material to create (or entirely compose) poems. There seems to be a split between more academic, intellectual, conceptual poetry (one example is Kenneth Goldsmith's complete transcript of one day of the NY Times or a complete record of the broadcast utterances from a Yankees-Red Sox game). The other, more politically oriented branch, often called documental poetry, uses the found source material to highlight an important issues, whether it's Claudia Rankine's use of collected microaggressions in 'Citizen' or Mark Nowak's use of mine safety records, news articles of mining disasters, and grade school lesson plans created by the American Coal Foundation in 'Coal Mountain Elementary.'

It's unclear to me how typical of Humanities scholarship Leong's book is, but in a way his rhetoric matches his subject - he has lots of texts (from theorists like Walter Benjamin or Derrida to other poetry-focused academics) all chopped up and in conversation with each other. As best I can tell, he's attempting to take the academic conceptual poetry / politically-engaged documental poetry divide and make a synthesis, but rather than sticking with the similarities in method he attempts to make a case that the more conceptual poems are also engaged in political action.

I can buy that conceptual poetry was a reaction to the trend toward incredibly personal, lyrical, and emotional poetry, but as an outsider I don't really buy his claim that the conceptual poetry is as politically engaged as the explicitly political documental poetry. That said I learned a ton about this type of poetry, I feel like I better understand 'Citizen,' and I'm excited to get a copy of 'Coal Mountain Elementary.'

**Thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.

[AcademicEditor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book suited to a more serious student or teacher of poetry. It draws connections between a number of modern poems that draw on existing documents and found material--what the author terms "documental" poetry. I found myself adding many new names to my TBR list, and having a renewed appreciation for poets from the 20th century who contributed to the current culture of poetic writing. For a "critical" work, it is still accessible and supportive of a plurality of poetic voices.

Thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for the opportunity to review a digital ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.